Short reviews by Madhuri on books by Cathy Glass, William Finnegan, Glen Tibaldeo and Laura Berger, James Lee Burke, Dr. Louis J. Camuti, Matt Lewis, Stevie Smith, Rosemary Thornton, Maria Coffey, Susan Lewis and George Mahood
Free Country
A penniless adventure the length of Britain
by George Mahood
A wonderful antidote to all things serious, fraught and heavy. I laughed all the way through!
Two young guys decide they will cycle from Land’s End in Cornwall to John O’Groats at the north of Scotland. But they are going to start out with nothing except a pair of Union Jack boxers each (and a notebook, pen, and small camera). No money, no phones, no IDs, no clothes, shoes, tents, food… and no bicycles. They are going to blag their way through and just see what happens.
So at 7 am on a cold summer morning there they are, in the car park at the touristy and unlovely southernmost point in England…
It is so funny, and so real, and so joyfully described in every mundane detail; and the way the two friends quibble and bicker is funny too. The book is self-published and could have used one more proofread, but the writing is pretty darn good, and the comic touch is very often faultless.
We meet a great many characters, and a lot of generosity, and some strange garments, and lots of free t-shirts, and some terrible hills, and dodgy bicycles, and some weather, and learn just a bit of very off-hand history. For me the book was an island of levity and relaxation in a somewhat stressy time! I recommend it – and I hope somebody makes it into a movie.
If many people pulled this stunt it would lose its novelty value and become un-funny; and if refugees with dark skin or different accents tried it I very much doubt they would meet the same reception – which is sad – but as it is the adventure hits just the right note of utter silliness and, in a way, utter luxury. What trust in life, to just let go like that, all over a whole small country!
Never Say Goodbye
How would you cope with losing someone you love?
by Susan Lewis
This writer has a beautiful memoir, Just One More Day, about her mother’s death at 33 from breast cancer – and the ways that people faced, and mostly didn’t face, such things back then. This book is a novel on the same terrifying subject, with a heroine based on the author’s own mum; but it sails into modern seas where things are much more out in the open and there is much more help available for families going through this awfulness.
I know from other novels that this writer can be a tear-jerker, and indeed I was weeping at the end – but that end is unexpectedly beautiful.
Two women from different classes are brought together via a breast cancer charity and become friends; there are sub-plots featuring romances, incest survivors, a gay son, and so on. Events are quite broadly drawn, there is enough sentiment to swamp us, we are spared nothing, we kind of wish it would be over… but then… by the end I felt that there was just one message here and that was love.
I didn’t approve of the things people ate and drank, which I was sure were not doing them any good, but nobody in the book seemed to think about that.
A well-researched, lush, and rather mainstream-minded tome on a dreadful subject; elevated by real warmth and tenderness.
Fragile Edge
Loss on Everest
by Maria Coffey
This beautiful, honest, well-written book is by the girlfriend of famous mountaineer Joe Tasker, who disappeared on Everest with Peter Boardman in 1982, not long after delivering the manuscript for his memoir Savage Arena.
It’s about the women left behind, and it goes a step further: she and Boardman’s widow went to Lhasa and then up to Camp 3 at 20,000 ft on Everest to see where their men had died, and to go with them in a sense: to find out what had driven them, why they had to keep climbing.
I felt a kind of relaxing into the prose because it was so good; and I related to both the struggles to get along with a man driven to seek hardship, and the struggles to allow oneself one’s surfeit of love and desire without burdening the other with it. Masterful, tender, and true, this is a worthy addition to the mountain genre.
Remembering the Light
How Dying Saved My Life
by Rosemary Thornton
A woman in her 40’s, still devastated by her husband’s suicide two years before, goes into hospital for a biopsy. The doctor nicks something he shouldn’t and the woman bleeds to death. She’s dead for 10 minutes, then is revived with electricity, even though her heart had stopped beating for lack of blood.
She goes to heaven and meets god, angels, bliss, etc. (Sometimes god is He and sometimes She in this account. Which is refreshing.) She is also fully cured of her cancer, arthritis, and what have you. And her misery and angst. And she understands life and true love and everything.
So it’s a gripping story; it’s also couched in Christian terms throughout, and it’s amazing how much praying everybody gets done – she, her friends, waiters in restaurants, strangers, everybody. NDE Midwest-style!
Quite frankly, this brought up a longing to be prayed for! It sounded great!
In the interests of NDEs generally, I’m including this book in my reviews, even though it’s not very well done. The author is an architectural historian with 9 books to her credit, but the thing is extremely repetitious, strangely organised, marred with dangling participles and the odd misspelling, and is breathless and swollen with itself. It certainly has a right to be this, but we get a bit tired of it. I think it would have done better as a long article, or a shorter book (it’s 232 pages) with the reps removed.
An example of a dangling participle: “It’s of special interest to me that less than 48 hours after bleeding to death, another gynaecological oncologist appeared in my hospital room and asked me about the chronology of events.”
I hate to be picayunish about such a fraught and profound subject, but this sentence is saying that the gynaecological oncologist bled to death and then appeared in the hospital room. Such things are distracting in a narrative and somebody ought to have caught it. The book is self-published and no editors are credited, so we don’t know who helped her with it, but I’m sure somebody did. They were just ignorant, is all. And I’m sure well-meaning.
Pedalling to Hawaii
A human-powered adventure
by Stevie Smith
An intrepid, sure-footed travelogue about an incredible journey. Two young Brits, who have never sailed, rarely biked, and one of whom has never camped, set off to make it round the world under their own steam – i.e. in human-powered vehicles: bicycle, in-line skates, kayak, and pedal-boat. They bike down to Portugal and then set off across the Atlantic in their custom-made plywood pedal-boat. They arrive in Florida with 100 dollars, a gift from a cable-ship crew they encountered in the middle of the sea.
And so it goes – they are often broke, often working odd jobs when on land, and always looking for big sponsors (which they never find, though dozens of people help them, and participate in their project, in all kinds of ways). They give endless slide shows to schools, clubs, and all sorts of orgs. It’s a story of almighty struggle, larded through with wonder, boozy goodbye parties, love affairs, and oodles of interesting characters. There is danger and heartache and insightful cultural observation. The scariest moment was a nightmarish encounter with the SF police, rather than the inevitable capsizing at sea!
And so they pedal, pedal, pedal, and years go by. The classic need of the young to test themselves is done great justice to, in this account of a brave and foolhardy journey. Full of the unexpected!
I recommend it highly.
Last Man Off
A True Story of Disaster, Survival and One Man’s Ultimate Test
by Matt Lewis
Superb book about a terrifying incident. A marine biologist, fresh out of university, takes a job as Observer on a rust bucket fishing boat assaying into the usually-ferocious Southern Ocean near Antarctica, hunting Patagonian Toothfish (known to restaurant diners as Chilean Sea Bass). Lots of people mess up lots of things, (not a single safety drill was ever done on the voyage, just as one small example) and so when the really big storm hits…
The author took many years to finally feel ready to write about what happened, and even then it put him back through the wringer.
Quite a story. Highly recommended.
All My Patients Are Under the Bed
Memoir of a Cat Doctor
by Dr. Louis J. Camuti
A classy little memoir by a veterinarian who for decades made house calls to cats in New York City. Born in 1893 in Italy to wealthy and fairly aristocratic parents, he arrived with them in New York aged 9 with not a word of English. We get a brief history of how he became a vet and married his childhood sweetheart, and then there’s lots and lots about various animals he treated – mostly cats – and their people. Lots about their people! Including various luminaries from bygone days. The book is sensible, down-to-earth, plain-talking yet elegant; the vagaries of beast and human equally diverting. There are practical hints about cat care and a fair bit of myth-busting.
A light-on-its-feet, friendly, and very grounded read.
Heaven’s Prisoners
by James Lee Burke
I debated whether or not to comment on this book, because the brilliance of its prose (which is really poetry) is tainted, for me, by the violence in it. It’s half a journey into a poetically-described hell and half luminous nature writing.
I’d read other books by this author long ago but gave him up because of the violence. But when I found this in the book booth I frequent I thought I’d give him another go. And I was once again flabbergasted by how beautiful and original is his imagery, how hypnotic his cadence, how sensitively-observed are so many details, of humankind and its interactions, and of the bayous and islands and grasses and trees, sunrises and sunsets of southern Louisiana. He’s nihilistic, but even that is expressed so richly that it becomes beautiful.
I was left wishing he had ever written anything other than detective fiction. The tropes are repetitive: obligatory homicide, one of the bad guys at least turning out to be a female, just to prey on our surprise; slick-talking males trading devastatingly clever, yet understated insults out of the corners of their mouths. (I don’t think that I personally have ever heard actual men talk like that.) With his gift of poetry and his tireless output he could have given us something well worth keeping.
The emotional tenor is so rich, half-suppressed, and sometimes tender that, when I put it down at the end, I felt stuffed quietly and maybe half-reluctantly full of someone else’s – some male person’s – passion.
This particular book is from 1980, but it feels more like the 50’s – the casual, grimed-into-the-grain racism (although the hero is quietly compassionate and egalitarian, each character we meet is described as White or Negro or Colored or Redbone or Mulatto – we never get a break from these designations) – the dial phones, the fed-up but long-suffering and beautiful women, either prostitutes, waitresses, or housewives; the casual hunting-fishing way of looking at wildlife. And the towns and roads and houses are rustic, organic, and unimproved. The plot is a tangle of bad guys and good guys and in-between guys doing all kinds of crap, about love and loss and – very much – about alcoholism. There is a little girl found alive in a small plane downed in a bayou, and immediately adopted by hero and hero’s wife. There are law enforcement dudes of various stripes, with all their various human strengths and failings.
I am in awe of anyone who can write like he does, book after book (Wikipedia says he was still going strong at 87) – but I wish that life had offered him something happier to write about – at least sometimes!
Radical Sabbatical
A Hilarious Journey from a Stifling Rut to a Life without Boundaries
by Glen Tibaldeo and Laura Berger
I read this through with interest and even delight, even though each page was dripping with dangling participles [see above], and the author had never learnt the difference between “lay” and “lie.” The incessant attempts at humour were often laboured or flat-footed, and lightning became lightening at least once.
I liked the book because: it was about Costa Rica, where Chintan and I spent last winter; so much was familiar in the scenery, the practical difficulties, the interactions. And the vehicular and bad-road difficulties! And because of the compassionate, friendly, humble, and often intelligent way he describes the difficulties in his marriage brought on by two very different people suddenly selling up their high-powered Chicago life and moving to the (spiritually radiant) tropics. He describes a certain relationship-problem-addressing technique they use (and have written a book about) which I will copy out for my ‘techniques’ folder.
The book is even quite often funny! Especially when we meet hairy spiders and the like. And the guy is so enthusiastic and energetic, he’s willing to take us along in the adventure in great detail.
Let’s just say, it’s a comedy of errors wherein much is experienced, and perhaps something is learnt for the better.
Barbarian Days
A Surfing Life
by William Finnegan
The chiefest emotion I felt while reading this was awe.
For the writing, for the scope of the thing – so many continents and countries and oceans and relationships and surf-buddies and social milieus explored here – but most of all for the Path of Surfing. (Some aficionados insist it is not a sport but a path.) I felt awe that people can spend so much of their lives in a state of electrical attunement to nature, bare-bodied in the storm, dancing with the moment.
Then there are the descriptions of the various waves and how they change, and the physics of them – this delirious joyous fidelity to fact and colour and form and weight seems to take up about half the book. I was sometimes defeated by the technicality, but it didn’t seem to matter. I still felt the weight and lift and roll of the thing.
“As we got closer to the lineup, the power and beauty of the waves got more drenching. A set rolled through, shining and roaring in the low winter afternoon sun, and my throat clogged with emotion – some nameless mess of joy, fear, love, lust, gratitude.”
That was in Madeira.
Here is Hiram Bingham, the first Calvinist missionary to arrive in Hawaii, directly into a crowd of surfers, in 1820, when EVERYBODY surfed – man, woman, child: “The appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism, among the chattering, and almost naked savages, whose heads and feet, and much of their sunburnt swarthy skins, were bare, was appalling. Some of our number, with gushing tears, turned away from the spectacle.”
So he set about destroying the cult of surfing, and largely succeeded.
So we get some history too.
But mostly we get waves. 499 pages of them. Only towards the end do we find out that the author – who grew up in California and Hawaii – has been a staff writer for the New Yorker for decades! Travelling and writing about wars and disasters and godknowswhatall.
And I must say, I didn’t see a single typo in the book!
One point he talks about quite a bit is the reverse bragging among surfers. You are not supposed to brag! You are not, when you emerge unscathed and triumphant from a long barrel wave, supposed to call attention to yourself in any way – not even the smallest gesture – to say Yay for me! And yet… surfers tend to be extremely interested in photographs of themselves a’ la wave. So a huge amount goes on unspoken that has to do with male egos and hierarchies. We hear a lot about that. A wave 20 feet tall, for example, can never be described as being above 8 feet. You always have to minimise waves. That’s the law.
If you’ve ever surfed, it’ll be fascinating for that. If you haven’t, it doesn’t matter – there are enough adventures of all sorts in here to be spread over several lifetimes.
A long way from home
How many heartbreaks can a little girl take?
by Cathy Glass
I really like this writer – clear, grounded, she gives a detailed, blow-by-blow account of events – and I like her subject: fostering, adoption, families gone wrong, families that mostly function, and why. She has one novelised true story about a mother and child escaping from a controlling maniac – Run Mummy Run – that was especially great.
This book is one of her grittiest. The first half concerns a couple in their 30s trying to adopt a child from an orphanage in some unnamed European country – sounds like Romania. I felt tense and scalp-prickly throughout that part. Awful, the orphanage, with mean attendants and most of the little ones disabled. Any donated clothing, toys, or playground equipment is immediately stolen by the attendants and taken home for their own or relatives’ kids.
The second half concerns what happens when the child they get, age two and a half when they finally get her, back in England, is eventually at age 5 given up for fostering, and the author gets her. The child has what is called an Attachment Disorder, which happens if no adult bonds lovingly with a baby. She is cold, without empathy, dictatorial, and perennially angry.
It’s scary and yet brings in the author’s no-nonsense, fair, loving, extremely stabilising child-rearing style – and I’ve often, reading her books, wished I’d met her when I was a kid! My own mother was extravagantly loving but had 7 kids and a husband to take care of, and it was chaos, and there just wasn’t any way for the kind of calm, savvy-in-the-world-and-amongst-human-psychology “We’ll get this sorted” ethos displayed by this author.
The ending is surprising!
Featured image by Logan Kuzyk on Unsplash
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